Psycholapse

My first clear memory was of waking up in a hospital casualty department. Gradually, I became aware of the noise: cries of pain, voices raised in anger and fear, the continual bustle of people and machinery passing nearby. Then I opened my eyes and focused on the ceiling; tracing a network of cracks in the badly painted plaster. I don’t remember feeling any particular emotion, except for a slightly dazed… blankness…

I turned my head to one side, to where most of the noise was coming from. I appeared to be in a small cubicle, formed on three sides by threadbare lengths of green curtain. Through a gap between them, I could see a narrow corridor and some more cubicles on the opposite side.

There was a lot of activity: Stretchers, trolleys and wheelchairs passed to and fro, carrying bodies in various states of bloodiness and distress. Harassed people in uniform were shouting at each other.

None of this really meant anything to me. I just lay there – I don’t know how long for – gazing emptily at the parade of carnage.

Eventually, my sense of detachment began to fade and I started to feel bored and slightly foolish. So far as I could tell, I was uninjured. I was certainly in no pain. Probably, I had suffered a mild concussion and been in a temporary state of shock. From the hubbub all around, it was easy to deduce that there had been a major incident of some kind. A terrorist bombing, or some such. My inability to recall any details supported my self diagnosis: Amnesia was just a ruse employed by the mind to protect itself from trauma.

Yeah, well, what the hell, I thought, as I struggled to sit up. For a moment, I felt a wave of nausea and dizziness, but it soon ebbed to leave just a shallow pool of light headed confusion.

The smell of damp earth helped to clear my thoughts. There were smears of mud on the sleeves and lapels of my jacket and grass stains on the knees of my trousers. My hands were caked with filth and crusted with dried blood. One of my shoes was missing and my soggy sock made my foot feel cold and wet.

I was just considering whether to attempt to stand up when one of the curtains was pushed aside and a young man in a white coat entered the cubicle.

“So, here you are,” he said, in a tone which suggested he had been searching for me for some time. “Come on; let’s get the fuck out of this place.”

I regarded him blankly for a moment. “I’m not sure I appreciate your bedside manner, doctor,” I said.

The young man pushed his fingers through the ragged fringe of his unkempt mop of red hair in a nervous gesture which I found vaguely familiar. I looked again at the stocky figure, realising that the white coat he was wearing was at least two sizes too large. Of course, it was meant to be a disguise.

“Very funny, Jon. Now shift your arse.”

I shrugged. Partly with indifference and partly as if donning a disguise of my own. I wrapped a comfortable cloak of cynicism – or, at least, heavy sarcasm – around myself.

“OK Martyn. Calm down,” I urged. “What’s the rush?”

“Forget the laid back crap,” he snapped, glancing nervously at some gadget on his wrist. “The seventies are long gone – and so should we be!”

I lowered my feet to the floor. The rather worn tiles felt extremely cold. I stood up cautiously and tried to ignore my protesting muscles. As I started to walk, my shoe squeaked, then my sock squelched and I almost slipped over. Martyn grabbed me by the elbow and dragged me out into the corridor. Off balance, I half ran, half limped, behind him towards the exit, my feet still going squeak, squelch all the while.

“Hold on!” I shouted, hopping on one foot and struggling to pull my shoe off the other.

Martyn glared at me in exasperation. It appeared that my antics were attracting too much attention and threatening to delay us even further. A member of staff was sure to challenge us soon.

Martyn intimated that it had taken him a long time to find me because a rather too hasty triage had declared me dead. Glancing again at the black, metallic device on his wrist, he watched silver pinpoints of light moving across its surface… Decaying chronons… expanding and fading… ripples of increasing improbability…

Now barefoot, I padded over to join him. “Nice bracelet,” I commented. “You know, Diane used to have one just like it.”

“Stop being a wanker, Jon. We’re playing this game by my rules, now. You had your chance and blew it.”

“Oh, so it’s the Martyn Monoverse instead of the Kopek Continuum. You’ve always lacked imagination.”

“I prefer logic to chaos, yes. But your scheme to provoke an ‘Evolution’ was always doomed to failure. There is no ‘Real’ world. All the Alternatives are equally real. Your intention to shackle the whole of human imagination to some half baked theory about time and identity was a complete non starter.”

I smiled. Martyn knew it was always a bad sign when I smiled. He almost flinched away from the sight. Especially when my lips parted and my smile became a vampiric snarl.

The corridor seemed to be growing darker. The walls receded and disappeared into a sudden grey mistiness that also smothered every sound. The temperature dropped. Frost formed in my hair, glistening silver amongst the black, like the indicator lights on Martyn’s wrist.

“Do you still insist that time is not a state of mind?” I sneered; continuing to smile, even though my feet were turning blue and becoming frozen to the floor.

“I’m not impressed by your theatrics,” Martyn replied defiantly, as he resumed walking along the spectral corridor, towards where a green, glowing sign persisted in illuminating the word ‘EXIT’.

I shrugged my shoulders in a gesture that was becoming habitual. “Ah, well. It was worth a try,” I muttered. Lacking any ideas of my own, I decided to continue following Martyn, who appeared to have some urgent purpose in mind. I sidestepped out of limbo and staggered a moment, hit by the fluorescent lighting and the sharp stink of antiseptic.

Martyn pushed open the swing doors and emerged into the open air. The sky was criss-crossed by vapour trails and by a single vein of red light: The exhaust from United Nations’ fighter jets and the glowing trail of comet Kohoutec. Plumes of smoke rose above the rooftops and the smell of burning filled my nostrils.

The frenzied activity inside the hospital was nothing compared to the total chaos outside. The driveway and parking area were choked by vehicles of all types. Ambulances, fire engines, police cars, army trucks and private cars were all trying to manoeuvre round each other in the limited space. Hundreds of bodies lay in rows upon the grass, with scattered teams of doctors and nurses trying to work their way methodically along the lines of human misery and mutilation.

I ambled along behind Martyn, wincing at the incredible din. “I don’t remember any of this shit!” I shouted. “What war is it now?”

Martyn eyed me up and down with contempt. Perhaps my flippancy in the face of so much horror was inappropriate. “That’s hardly relevant,” he snapped. “With any luck, it’ll be the war to end all wars.”

“Ha! That’s what they always say.”

“Look, if you want to achieve something worthwhile, for once – to vindicate yourself for all your past failures – then all I need is a few minutes of your time.” Martyn spoke briskly and with his gaze fixed directly on mine.

A squadron of helicopters flew low overhead as a series of explosions sounded from the other side of the hospital. The sudden increase in tumult served to underline the urgency of Martyn’s words. A light rain of debris began to fall and the smell of burning grew stronger.

“Oh, bugger,” said Martyn quietly. He appeared to be trying not to panic as he began to run round the side of the building towards the site of the explosions. The air became noticeably warmer and a cloud of smoke was rolling along the ground towards him. All the windows were broken and a few shards of glass were still tumbling from the charred frames. Directly ahead of him, there was a twisted pile of wreckage, from which all the heat and smoke was emanating.

I trailed along behind him, but halted when pieces of hot shrapnel and fragments of glass began to bite the soles of my bare feet.

“Believe it or not,” said Martyn, hardly believing it himself. “But the bastards have blown up our car.”

“Not the Harrington Alpine…?”

“’Fraid so.”

A number of armed soldiers in UN uniform were running across the churned up and smouldering grass towards us. Martyn took a deep breath and seized me by the wrist.

“We’re going to have to take a short cut. Brace yourself, this won’t be pleasant,” he warned.

There was a brief moment when the whole world seemed to be poised, as if at an apex, ready to fall. The device on Martyn’s wrist became the centre of gravity towards which everything was being drawn. The fabric of space itself began to swirl, making me feel nauseous, as I found myself spiralling down… down… and somehow being dragged… into… the circular void…

Martyn’s arm disappeared… through… his bracelet… The vortex engulfed his head, shoulder, body, legs; until only the hand clutching my wrist remained. And still, he continued to fall.

My hand passed through into nothingness. A sharp thrill of pain ran up the length of my arm, as if the limb was being dragged into a mincing machine. Before I could even begin to struggle free, there was an explosion of blinding agony and my head, somehow, was drawn into the ring. For the space of a single heartbeat, I wore a halo of ebony flecked with silver. Then, my skull splintered apart into a million fragments…

… reborn, screaming, out of a blood red/black/silver expanse of dimensionless pain. Expelled; onto hard, cold ground and wrapped in flowing, cool, fluid air. I lay, bewildered, upon the pavement, breathing quickly. Martyn still holding my wrist tight. (The opposite wrist, I realised.) I looked up at a sky now clear and pastel blue. My ears ached as I sought to find a single sound to break the silence. If it had not been for the urgent gasp of my own breath, I would have believed myself to have become deaf.

Martyn released his grip and struggled to stand up. He said something about ‘the physical effects of having his temporal valency altered’ and ‘undergoing a trans-chronal recombination’ being as ‘profound and distressing as always’. As he removed his white coat, I noticed that its buttons were now on the left side. Also, his ‘bracelet’ was on the opposite wrist to where it had been. He placed his hand on his chest. From his perplexed look, I gathered that his heart had also moved to the right.

I looked around. The hospital had been replaced by an ancient, half ruined monastery, overgrown with moss and ivy. The car park was an untended herb garden, long since gone to seed. The pavement was cracked and uneven, with clumps of weeds thrusting up between the grimy concrete slabs. A silver Harrington Alpine sports car, beginning to show streaks of rust, was parked nearby.

I had managed to regain my composure and attempted to act as if nothing unusual had happened. I stood up and brushed ineffectively at the dirt on my clothes, then ran my fingers through my matted hair. I found that these new surroundings looked very familiar and was comforted by the presence of my car; intact.

“All right,” I said. “Where to now?”

“This is the place, Jon. This is the time.”

The car door opened and a figure emerged: A young man wearing a black leather trench coat and knee high boots, an open necked white shirt and a pair of dark glasses. He struck a casual but arrogant pose, leaning with one arm on the roof of my car.

Another figure loomed out of the shadowy ruins: A long haired man, wearing a black denim jacket and jeans, carrying a gun in his right hand. His movements were quick and nervous. His eyes were bright and psychotic.

Yet another figure appeared, strolling out of the garden: Metallic fibres in his bright red suit sparkled in the sunshine. His dark hair was feathered in a severely short gipsy cut. His lips were twisted into a grim parody of a smile. As he ambled along, he swiped at the dense weeds with a metal bar.

There was a sudden loud burst of music from further up the road. A fourth young man was approaching, strumming an electric guitar fitted with a portable amplifier. At first, he appeared to be naked and sexless; but then, I realised he was wearing a sort of flesh coloured leotard. His features were plastered with a thick layer of makeup, which rendered him almost faceless.

“What is this?” I demanded. “An ambush?”

“Hmm… Temporal overload building nicely… random chronons attracted to a pseudo-gravity/time well… negative core… focus of implosion…” Martyn muttered incomprehensibly to himself; watching spirals of light forming and collapsing into patterns on his ‘bracelet’.

My sense of déjà vu was becoming stronger and less comforting. “I’ve got a bad feeling…” I complained, as even more figures appeared and began to form a small, mocking crowd.

A stooped, bearded man in black armour, which was obviously too heavy for his emaciated frame, limped into view.

A much younger man, wearing loon pants and a tie-dyed granddad vest, edged nervously round the corner of the monastery, his eyes sunken into darkness.

A middle aged man, costumed in a dark, conservative, double breasted business suit – his hair greying and thin on top – sauntered over and sneered.

“If you really want to know,” said Martyn, in a patronising voice. “I got the idea from Steve and Sheila. He wanted a single, designer Reality he could exploit. She employed the technology of a future Alternative to cauterise the worst effects of the Psycholapse. I realised that, by bringing together a sub-critical number of your Alternative selves, I could bend time into whatever shape I wanted.”

“And you expect me to co-operate?” I asked, incredulously.

“You already have,” he stated. “Just by being here.”

“That’s what you think,” interjected one of the figures. A man of indeterminate age, dressed entirely in black, stepped forward to confront Martyn. The long strands of his black hair, cut pageboy style, framed a pale, unhealthy looking face. His eyes were so dark and deep set that the sockets appeared to be empty. He raised a black, axe like weapon in a gesture that was almost too casual to be threatening. Mesmerising pinpoints of light could be seen, whirling and glittering, within the strange translucent metal blades.

“What the fuck…?” Martyn recoiled in fear.

The man reached out slowly with the axe. He touched it lightly against Martyn’s wrist.

“Explanations would be of little consequence,” he intoned, as if his words were an epitaph.

The scene became vague and lacking in colour and depth. Like an old photograph… fading into the future… I tried to sidestep into limbo, but was too late. Everything was already there. All my Alternative selves were one self, holding an axe that continued to fall…